Disclaimer:

These are my personal views and are meant for Informational purpose only. Please verify the Information via Professional help or via Official references before acting upon the information provided in this Blog.

Pivot table

In this series, I intend to document common questions asked by Power users about Excel connected to SSAS cubes (or data warehouse) after they go beyond the basic stage of understanding & using Row labels, column labels, report filter & values in Pivot Tables. This post is #4 of N:

a. How to Filter Measure Values?

Report Filters are a great way to put constraints on the data that is displayed. So once a user gets the concept of selecting dimensions as report filters & slicers, they might start wondering how to filter measure values? How do they show a list of customers that have ordered less than $100,000 worth of products? They might try to drag a measure to the report filter section but that won’t work & Excel will throw an error. So how can users filter measure values? it’s a feature of Pivot Table called “Value Filters” and that would be helpful here. Here are the steps:

1. Select the Pivot Table.

2. click on a drop down menu besides “row labels”

3. After that, go to Value Filters. You can see that you can filter by applying different rules like Top 10, less than, greater than, etc. Let me demo “Less than or equal to”

4. On the next dialog box, you can select the measure, rule & the filter value:

After you’ve set them up, click on ok and the Pivot Table will filter by measure values.

Note: Be careful when sharing the files that have value filters with other users, let them know that you’ve value filters set on the report as the value filters are not clearly visible if you’re looking at the file for first time.

b. How to move a Pivot Table?

If a user is trying to create a dashboard using excel, they’ll have more than one Pivot Table in a sheet. In that case, they’ll need to move the Pivot Tables around. here are the steps:

1. select the Pivot Table.

2. In the menu bar, go to Pivot table Tools > Move Pivot Table:

3. select your NEW destination and click on OK.

That’s it!

Conclusion:

In this post, we saw how to filter measure values & how to move Pivot Tables.

DateTime columns can be tricky for analysis purposes. They don’t work well with Pivot Tables because of the time part, each value seems unique to the Pivot Table & it also creates problems while creating relationships with Date Dimensions. And so, It’s a common need to convert them to just Date before analyzing data & also a common need to create a relationship between the Date (and not DateTime) with Date Dimension Table.

So if it’s possible, I try to do the data type conversion in the source system query. If your source system is SQL Server, you could use this piece of code:

Microsoft announced a cloud based business intelligence platform called Power BI – as a part of that, the project (in public preview) that was previously called “Data Explorer” will be released as “Power Query”. It’s a great tool that have used to find, clean and shape data in Excel 2010, very useful! So one of the first things I checked was whether Excel 2010 can run Power Query or not. Turns out, it does! It works with Excel 2010 professional plus (Please read the system requirements on the official download page for details)

And of course, I downloaded and installed it on my Excel 2010 professional plus.If you’ve not installed Office 2010 SP1 or higher, do that too.

Please note that this change affects some of the blog posts that I’ve published on this blog, Here’s the list:

That’s about it for this post. Update your “Data Explorer” tab to “Power Query” if you haven’t already! It’s a handy tool and I am glad to see that Data Explorer Power Query runs on Excel 2010 Pro Plus!

Formula (Calculated Measure):

Results via a Pivot Table:

Note that the formula is a building block and you’ll have to make changes as per your requirement and data model. Feel free to leave a comment if you need some assistance from my side. And also consider using the PowerPivot forum to reach out to community: MSDN Forum – PowerPivot for Excel